User talk:TheTimesAreAChanging

Your behavior

Telling a site administrator to "get a clue" over legitimate edits to an article is perhaps not the wisest thing for you to be doing. Your attitude perhaps needs to change if you wish to continue in good standing on this project. Bumm13 (talk) 04:27, 14 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Brief informations regarding an insufferable narcissist

Note how it was as much about Obama himself as any success he had in his organizing work. … Jager soon came to realize, she told Garrow, that Obama had "a deep-seated need to be loved and admired." … "In law school the only thing I would have voted for Obama to do would have been to shut up," one student told Garrow. Classmates created a Obamanometer, ranking "how pretentious someone's remarks are in class."

And to think this ghastly man was worshipped by liberals… Really sounds like a great book. I shall attempt to work it into the Obama article. It contains crucial insights. --BowlAndSpoon (talk) 22:21, 4 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]

1957 alleged Jordanian military coup attempt

Could you give your opinion on the article? It is very complex which made it difficult for me to organize my thoughts, I hope you can point out to any possible inconsistencies. Makeandtoss (talk) 01:16, 6 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I thought the article was very well-written, not to mention long overdue—it's kind of shocking that it took so long to create an article about such an important event in Jordanian history. America's Great Game by Hugh Wilford has some additional circumstantial evidence for the "U.S. false flag" theory, though it doesn't add much to the facts as you've outlined them.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 01:42, 6 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Your AE topic ban is lifted

This is in response to your following e-mail:

"Given that six months have now passed since you imposed an American Politics topic ban on me for incivility and personal attacks at the "Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections" article, I am writing to request that you consider lifting it on the grounds that it is no longer necessary. I have no intention of returning to the vitriolic talk page rants that got me in trouble, or even of relitigating the question of whether Russia truly interfered, which seems to have been resolved by more recent sources. I have been on Wikipedia for seven years and edited in a wide range of topics, including promoting one Featured Article, and have only been topic banned once, due to a combination of a heated election season and what I still consider admins's general trigger-happiness in this particularly contentious area of the encyclopedia. I maintain that six months is a long enough punishment to serve as a deterrent, and that prolonging the ban would primarily impede my ability to edit in areas tangentially related to American Politics without benefitting the project."

Your request is granted and the topic ban is lifted. Best regards, Sandstein 13:13, 12 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Sandstein!TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 18:16, 12 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Didn't you say to @Sandstein: that you "had no intention" of returning to that page? Pretty quick for no intention.Casprings (talk) 02:44, 13 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

No, as a matter of fact I didn't, but I appreciate your interest, Casprings. I have no intention of returning to the vitriolic talk page rants that got me in trouble, or even of relitigating the question of whether Russia truly interfered, which seems to have been resolved by more recent sources. That said, I have been sitting on several edits for the last several months, and ultimately decided to get them out of my system. I hope you can understand that. Regards,TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 02:51, 13 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Must have been able to see into the future to be thinking Months ago of trump's talking point on the Ukraine and Clinton over the Don Jr thing. However, if you do return to the talk page, we can discuss how one politico story where one OP researcher was searching for info on Manafort is a pretty poor link to Clinton and that talking point is UNDUE, given the article.Casprings (talk) 03:01, 13 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

No, I'll return to the talk page, but I shall endeavor to avoid the tl;dr screeds for which I have become infamous.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 03:06, 13 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

BTW: "Must have been able to see into the future to be thinking Months ago of trump's talking point on the Ukraine and Clinton over the Don Jr thing." Actually, I merely read the Politico report when it came out in January. Again, kind regards,TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 07:31, 13 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

please do not simply disappear relevant text without detailed explanation (in particular, of discussion of chlorination Iraqi water supply during sanctions)

My Dear TheTimesAreAChanging, simply disappearing block text discussing Iraqi water treatment vulnerabilities because it did not suit an argument you might like to advance helps no one. Additions and edits are not exercises in polemics; this aims to be an encyclopedia, so do not simply disappear relevant text without detailed explanation.

Simply passingly calling disappeared passages (without even having the courtesy of identifying them) "unreliable" is lazy scurrilousness, in this case with obviously tendentious aims: to replace what had been presented with a view that suits your own.

This is the the source you cited as unreliable: a statement from David Sole, President of the Sanitary Chemists & Technicians Association-UAW Local. 2334 at the Detroit Water & Sewerage Department, here: https://web.archive.org/web/20081203113830/http://www.iacenter.org/iraqchallenge/water.htm.

One can await with suspense how this source is unreliable.

Further, the opposing view from a Pentagon official (along with further deletion of the fact that the need for chlorine, whose importation had been banned by the relevant sanctions) ignored the relevant point. The basic point did not concern money. It concerned materials needed for the sterilization of the water supply. Importation of those materials was banned by sanctions.

If you do not have any understanding of the fundamental issues pertaining to an article, please do not try to be clever, disappearing text and substantive issues, substituting tendentious sources, etc.

Although the blockquote (and article) by Rubin nowhere addresses the relevant point, the article that you cites will nonetheless be retained after undoing disappeared text.

Your attempt moreover to editorialize that the Rubin article selected "eviscerates" a point that that article does not even address just makes you both look silly. (The point being the import bans on materials that the sanctions imposed, not $$ spent by Saddam Hussein, mention of which--including "presidential palaces" and "smuggling," are just transparent polemics directed by Rubin at Iraq pre-2003, and which aren't relevant to the main point that they they take issue with. Mention of the Intifada is moreover totally unrelated, and makes drive-by removal of relevant text and its replacement with irrelevant bashing of Saddam Hussein look still more idiotic and transparently motivated.)

Again, please do not simply disappear relevant text that is not to your liking, particularly when you (apparently) do not understand the fundamental issues pertaining to a given topic. Take care, and all the best, Alfred Nemours (talk) 06:37, 14 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

What follows pertains to your attempt to defend your recent removal of material on the Sanctions against Iraq page. I have commented there as well.

First, Third World Traveler was not provided as a source, and if you read the quoted material that you impugn, you know this. Third World Traveler is a website that reprinted an article published in the Progressive magazine. Please do not distort or exaggerate to distract from relevant issues at play. Second, before calling throwing mud at a source for being unreliable (here, "completely unreliable")--particularly in the case of simply disappearing text without explanation--provide some reason for doing so. Anticipating the kind of "reason" you might provide in advance, empty political labels used to stain a source's reputation are not mainly what I have in mind. What I have in mind more relates to the quality of the testimony provided. Third, the irony in this case is your complaint given the source you have added. Invoking the opinion of Michael Rubin to weigh in on the humanitarian impact of sanctions on Iraqi society is like invoking the opinion of Carlos the Jackal on the likelihood of a Sarah Palin run for the Republican party presidential nomination in 2024. Rubin has proved a tireless advocate for regime change in Iraq, worked for the Pentagon during an administration that maintained the sanctions, and his argument does not even address the relevant issues concerned, namely the import restrictions (you take issue with the word banned, but the point is the same) placed on Iraq, but instead distracts by invoking transparently polemical references to "presidential palaces," "smuggling," and the character of Saddam Hussein, and the Palestinian Intifada (?). Moreover, Rubin provides no evidence for his innuendo or for anything else he suggests. Nonetheless, I have retained the Rubin's discussion because I don't simply disappear sources that I don't agree with, and because his arguments (if his empty competitive posturing to throw mud on villains that distract from the issue at hand can be called arguments). If you would like more documentation about assessments of Iraqi public health after several years of sanctions, that would be a very reasonable thing to want for this article, although from your actions so far I suspect you would want to minimize such a thing. Say what you'd like about Leslie Stahl, but it's difficult to argue that her question posed to Albright was motivated by partisanship or that she was either an exponent of Pentagon or Saddamist policy. Fourth, how is a President of the Sanitary Chemists & Technicians Association unreliable or incompetent to speak on issues relating to water treatment and sanitation?? (Again, here I'm totally flummoxed. Are you at all serious in suggesting otherwise? You replaced his testimony with that of a Pentagon neocon working for an administration that maintained the hold of sanctions. The second figure is less of a dispassionate observer than the first?)

Please be advised that this seems to be nothing but trolling. Nothing you have said or imported into the article shows the slightest concern for the Iraqi people under the sanctions, which is the topic at issue in the relevant portion of the article. There is no problem if you do not care about this issue, but disappearing text and sources which you replace with discussion from Pentagon ideologues seems to me a waste of all of our energy in developing content for this encyclopedia. Please seek out entries to which you can contribute and make contributions rather than find entries from which to sneakily censor (vandalize) content.

The Imperial Presidency

This article has many longstanding problems and that statement from the DJ, stated in WP's voice is typical of the content that fails policy, per the article improvement tag. Marking substantive edits as "minor" is disruptive. Please also review the meaning of WP:VANDALISM and do not misuse the term in edit summaries. You may pursue any argument for this dustjacket POV text on the talk page, but it's not OK to edit-war it back in after two editors have removed it. SPECIFICO talk 15:24, 14 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

SPECIFICO: You're earnestly defending this edit as "not vandalism"? Really? (You have reviewed the edit in question, yes?) Do you want to ask an admin?

As you say, the article has many problems and mostly just regurgitates Schlesinger's arguments from the book (virtually the entire article could be deleted with the edit summary "POV statement in WP's voice"). However, considering that you didn't know The Imperial Presidency was first published in 1973 and appear simply to have followed me there, perhaps the best course of action would be to leave the article intact until an expert is able to give it the care it deserves, rather than deleting paragraphs more or less arbitrarily.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 15:37, 14 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]